Ethiopia: Africa ZGlasnost

ETHIOPIA

African Glasnost

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s first year in office ended with an international crisis: the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, a Boeing jet whose 157 passengers perished on March 10.

Abiy’s government called for investigations into the jet’s control systems – a powerful example of a developing country standing up to an American multinational corporation, the New York Timesreported.

The 42-year-old prime minister is in a position of strength. His record is widely viewed as a success. “He ended a 20-year conflict with neighboring Eritrea, freed thousands of political prisoners, unfettered the media and appointed women to half the cabinet posts,” wrote the BBC.

Hassen Hussein, an opposition leader who lived in exile before Abiy’s reforms allowed his return, told Agence France-Presse that Ethiopia might have descended into civil war without the prime minister’s ascendance.

In what’s perhaps the most striking sign of his success, Ethiopia attracted a record $13 billion in foreign investment in the past year, fueling infrastructure projects throughout the country, setting the stage for an expansion in exports, and fostering rapid urbanization in the capital of Addis Ababa, Bloomberg wrote. The country sports the fastest growing economy in Africa.

“Has Abiy Ahmed turned Ethiopia into a one-man show?” Al Jazeera quipped in a headline.

But Al Jazeera’s story noted that the prime minister faces a big test in elections in 2020, when he’ll be expected to oversee the polls fairly while heading off inter-ethnic violence.

Ethiopia is rich in ethnic and religious diversity. Oromo, Amhara and other ethnic groups practice Orthodox Christianity, Islam and Protestantism.

But clashes among those groups have killed more than 1,000 people in recent years and displaced hundreds of thousands of others,according to Human Rights Watch, which praised Abiy’s overall record on civil rights but decried a breakdown in public safety.

Ethnic frictions tend to play out on a national scale in Ethiopia. Ethnic Tigrayans, for example, oppose Abiy’s civil service reforms, which they claim are designed to cull their people from government offices, the Financial Times wrote. The prime minister and his supporters counter that Tigrayans are overrepresented.

Kjetil Tronvoll, a Norwegian scholar of peace and conflict studies,told Deutsche Welle that Abiy had “disconnected the authoritarian state and invited a plurality of opinion to surface.” That makes for a more vibrant democracy but also might give formerly repressed hate groups space to grow.

Mikhail Gorbachev faced similar problems with glasnost. Abiy has many different ways his future could go. Most hope it’s full of peace and prosperity.